James Gurney

This daily weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.

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or by email:gurneyjourney (at) gmail.comSorry, I can't give personal art advice or portfolio reviews. If you can, it's best to ask art questions in the blog comments.

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All images and text are copyright 2015 James Gurney and/or their respective owners. Dinotopia is a registered trademark of James Gurney. For use of text or images in traditional print media or for any commercial licensing rights, please email me for permission.

However, you can quote images or text without asking permission on your educational or non-commercial blog, website, or Facebook page as long as you give me credit and provide a link back. Students and teachers can also quote images or text for their non-commercial school activity. It's also OK to do an artistic copy of my paintings as a study exercise without asking permission.

Thursday, May 1, 2008

For the last few weeks, I’ve been doling out tips from the dino art workshop in the current issue of ImagineFX Magazine. Here are the final two that I'll share on the blog. If you want the whole workshop, you’ll have to grab the magazine.

Five foot eye levelIn scientific paintings of dinosaurs, you obviously can’t show humans for comparative size, but you can imply a human scale of reference. We’re accustomed to seeing photos taken from about a five foot standing height. If you set the viewpoint at five feet above the ground, you’ll give an implicit sense of how big the dinosaur really are.

When I painted this diagram for a National Geographic story on Argentinian dinosaurs, I used two ghosted figures and a grid of meter squares to show relative scale.

Separate the light and shadowIf you’re painting a dinosaur on a sunny day, don’t underestimate the separation in tone between the light side and the shadow side. It's almost always greater than you think. Understating the separation between light and shadow is one of the most common mistakes of paleoart. It happens when we’re not totally sure of the form, so we’re hesitant to commit to what’s in light and what’s in shadow. Maquettes are a big help to solve this problem.

Photographers often measure the difference between light and shadow as at least two F-stops, depending on how much fill light is available. If you're counting steps on a value scale from one to ten, you might typically see five steps of tone from light to shadow. The separation between light and shadow would be less if you have high clouds, hazy atmosphere, or a lot of light bouncing up from a light-colored ground surface.